Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Media: from the "Age of Scarcity" to the "Age of Abundance"

"Do you have more media options and outlets at your disposal today than you did 5 to 10 years ago?," asks Tech Central Station. There was a day, about the time that AOL and Time Warner joined forces, when it was predicted that the consolidation of media corporations would result in an Orwellian world where information would be surveyed and controlled by one large company. This is all but true today. "With traditional media operators and industries (books, magazines, newspapers, television, radio, CDs, etc.) experiencing rapidly declining audience share thanks to substitution by new forms of digital media (Internet, blogging, mobile devices, DVDs, video games, i-Pods, satellite radio, etc.), we can be sure that the media environment five years from now will look radically different than it does today." Many larger companies, once thought to threaten democracy, are struggling to find new business models and diversify into new media forms in order to stay alive in today's world of "information overload" in which "the question of who owns what or how much they own is irrelevant." Of course, this contradicts the vision of our last posting on the AP which was predicted to be one of the two news organizations left standing. It also opposes the apocalyptic view that many have of Google, which has overwhelmingly been declared a media company (former posting and New York Times article) and that continues to spew out innovations that make one wonder just how far it will push the media market.